When Winter Fell

Chapter 1. Maunderings of a Mad Uncle

S.R. 1310, High Summer

'What is it, Master Bag, that has your face as long as a day in November?'

Bilbo jumped at the voice behind him. It was old Uncle Isengar, who was not really "old", as he would pass fifty only next year. But Isengar's face was weather-beaten, toughened by wind and sun and tempered with fine lines, and worse, the hobbit was mad as... Bilbo suppressed a shiver as a hearty hand clamped down upon his shoulder.

'Now then,' Isengar said, a little too heartily. 'What have we here?'

The tween reluctantly lifted the fine leather-clad volume with its wonderfully wrought pages of linen-laced vellum.

'Ah,' Isengar said. 'Father has taken exception to your hand-writing, has he? Don't tell me.' He dramatically covered his eyes and threw back his head, as a soothsayer will at the Free Faire, in order to make a greater impact on his credulous audience. 'You sent him a letter...'

Bilbo opened his mouth and closed it again as his uncle continued.

'A thank you note, it was,' Isengar said triumphantly, lowering his arm to gaze piercingly into Bilbo's eyes. 'And he pounced upon you, when you arrived for Bella's birthday celebration, forced this oliphaunt into your hands, and pronounced your doom.'

'H-how did you know?' Bilbo stammered, forgetting that he was talking to a mad hobbit, for Isengar was making a wonderful amount of sense with his shrewd guesses.

Isengar smiled a secret smile. 'I have my ways of knowing,' he said, and Bilbo shivered at the look in his eyes. Ten years ago the wizard Gandalf had fetched his uncle back to the Great Smials, raving and consumed by fever, his body broken in some terrible calamity, just what the wizard had never said. The Tooks had nursed Isengar back to life, or a semblance thereof. His gait was a hobble, and one of his arms hung useless in a sling, and there was a faraway look in his eye, most of the time, and he seldom talked sense, when he talked at all. It was said he'd 'gone to sea in his youth', and from what Bilbo could see, his uncle had never returned from there.

'Y-yes,' Bilbo said, looking for some avenue of escape. But they were alone in the tunnel, deep in the Great Smials, where he'd gone to escape his grandfather's piercing eye, and to think, and perhaps to find a place to bury the fine, horrifyingly blank book so that he could say later that he'd "lost" it.

'You're to keep a journal, are you? Write a daily entry, and bring it for my father's inspection on every visit to the Great Smials, until he pronounces your handwriting satisfactory?' Isengar said.

'How did you...?' Bilbo said again, and then kicked himself for a fool of a tween. Isengar had likely kept a journal of his own in his youth, at least before he'd "gone to sea". Bilbo's mother did; the study at Bag End held one shelf of volumes with his mother's tiny, spidery handwriting, though the one he'd peeked into, once, at his cousin Siggy's instigation, held tedious household accounts. He wasn't all that interested in books, anyhow, being much more concerned with the woods and fields, birds and animals, the ever-changing skyscape, Men and Dwarves travelling the Road, with their air of far places, and rumour of Elves. Bilbo thought he'd seen an Elf, once.

'Come with me, laddie-mine,' Isengar said, and Bilbo had no choice in the matter, with his uncle's grip once more firmly prisoning his shoulder. He'd have to "lose" the book later, it seemed.

Isengar pulled Bilbo along to the more-frequented part of the Great Smials, although the room where they ended was empty of Tooks. You wouldn't find any of those hobbits, of a fine day, cooped up in the library. Sometimes on rainy days, the younger hobbits would go there to play, scampering up and down the ladders or settling to look at picture-books when an adult poked head in the doorway to scold.

Isengar led the tween to a shadowy corner. He searched amongst the books there, muttering to himself, finally finding his quarry pushed back a little, hiding behind two other books. 'I thought it would be here,' he said in satisfaction. 'Nobody ever looks for this little gem. Why, it's in the same place where I left it...'

'Where you left it?' Bilbo said. He had never seen Isengar with a book in his hand. The hobbit was too restless to sit himself down; he prowled the corridors of the Great Smials from dawn until middle night, as if searching for something, but as far as Bilbo knew he'd never found it.

'O aye, youngster--when I was about your age, as a matter of fact, or only a little younger!' Isengar said with a sharp bark of laughter.

Not long before he ran away, Bilbo thought to himself, at least, if the rumours were true.

'You and I are not the only hobbits who've been chained to a journal until we could write "in a fair hand",' Isengar said in a conspiratorial whisper.

'Whose is this?' Bilbo said. 'My mother's?'

Isengar shook his head, a twinkle in the undimmed eye. 'She was too good at hiding her journals,' he said. 'She didn't want her brothers reading them, for some reason.' He thrust the book into Bilbo's hands, and the tween opened the book automatically, looking down at the scrawl on the first page.

'I can see why he needed handwriting practice,' Bilbo said. 'Grandfather would call this "a disgrace, and no mistake".'

'He did need practice, and he got it too, and a good thing, or the Yellow Book would be nearly unreadable,' Isengar said. 'Think of all the Tooks whose names would be lost to the future.'

Bilbo wasn't listening; he had turned back to the flyleaf, to read the inscription there, very similar to the inscription on his own pristine volume, though the precise writing was in a very old-fashioned style. 'Fortinbras?' he whispered. 'Cousin Fortinbras?' He began to grin, thinking of the secrets that might be revealed, suitable for hints and jests, but then he was recalled to himself, remembering that Isengar had hidden this book nearly thirty years past, when Fortinbras would have been newly born, or perhaps still just a twinkle in his father's eye. 'Thain Fortinbras?' he amended, and he wanted to drop the book, or stick it hastily back on the shelf, anything but commit the sacrilege of reading the private writings of his great-grandfather.

He wondered why the pages were so clean-looking, except for smudges from dirty fingers, and ink-blots that testified to the carelessness of the scribe. Perhaps the book was of Elf-make, just as his grandfather had solemnly observed about Bilbo's new encumbrance as Gerontius had presented it before Bilbo's beaming parents.

'Well he wasn't quite Thain at the time,' Isengar said with a smile. 'Hadn't even reached his twentieth year, as a matter of fact. Was a bit young, as it was, to begin writing, only twelve or thirteen, but his grandfather was looking to the future, much as yours is.'

'But I'll never be Thain,' Bilbo said. 'People will never be poring over my writing! I don't see why I have to "take thought for the future"!'

'Well now, you never know, Little Nephew,' Isengar said, ruffling Bilbo's curls as if he were a much younger lad. Bilbo bridled, but his uncle only laughed, the mad light returning to his eye.

'You just sit yourself down,' he said. 'Read a bit! You'll find that young hobbits had much the same feelings you have, for all they lived over an hundred years ago, or more...'

Bilbo let himself be guided to a shabby chair, well-worn by Tookish backsides over the years, comfortable for all its ramshackle appearance. Isengar pressed hard on his shoulder and he sat himself down.

'Read,' Isengar said flatly.

Bilbo opened the book to the first page and pretended to become at once engrossed. Just as soon as the "old" mad hobbit left the room, he'd make his escape. But Isengar did not leave the room; humming under his breath, he moved to the shelves, pulled a book off, opened it and stood there, apparently absorbed.

But when Bilbo looked up from the journal, he found his uncle's one good eye upon him. With a sigh, he looked down again at the book in his lap, and began to read.